Child Killer Executed in Missouri

People who murder children deserve a special place in hell, and they surely have a special place in the public mind. Folks who handle the end of the capital punishment process tell me that they observe a marked diminution in the number of execution protesters in child-victim cases. Even some of the "true believers" just have somewhere else they really have to be that day.

Elissa Self-Braun, then eleven years old, was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1991. While most capital cases involve no genuine doubt of guilt, the case against Martin Link was exceptional in that his guilt was doubly confirmed by DNA. His semen was in Elissa's body, and her blood was in a jar of petroleum jelly in his car. The Eighth Circuit opinion from 2006 has the facts of the crime.

Yesterday's News Scan noted the governor's denial of clemency. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has this story on the execution.

Elissa's parents Don Self and Pamela Braun were among the
witnesses at Link's execution.

"Justice was a long time coming," Self said afterward.

Link himself apparently absorbed the rhetoric of the anti-death-penalty movement.

"The state says killing is wrong, so why do they do it? It's
revenge," Link said. "Where is the closure? There is none. The
death penalty is an act of revenge."

Retribution is the correct word. And it is the right thing to do. We need to do it much more quickly, particularly in cases with no doubt of guilt. For starters, Congress should remove from federal habeas all issues that affect only penalty and are irrelevant to guilt.

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Call it revenge, call it retribution, or call it macaroni, sometimes it's just the right thing to do. To quote one of the marksmen who recently carried out the much-reported firing squad execution in Utah, "Some people just need to be kicked off the planet." Given what this guy did to that little girl, and given what he did to several other girls and women who lived to tell someone about it, I think he qualifies as one of those people.